Nolan Oswald Dennis: UNDERSTUDIES

Zeitz MOCAA presents UNDERSTUDIES, the first major South African museum solo exhibition by artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, who lives and works in Johannesburg. The exhibition embraces and maintains a dialogue with the artist’s longstanding para-disciplinary approach. Interested in the fraught history of scientific representation and intervention, the artist encourages us to think of artworks as models, diagrams, hypothetical annotations and simulations rather than sculptures, drawings and installations. The exhibition opens October 8, 2024 on Level 3, Elevator Side of the museum and runs until 25 May 2025.   

Nolan Oswald Dennis was born in 1988 in Lusaka, Zambia. Dennis holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand (2012) and a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2018). The artist’s practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation, questioning the politics of space and time through a system-specific approach. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landlessness and guided by the overlapping theories and practices of black, indigenous and queer liberation.

Using indexical, analytic and educational devices as tools for rehearsal rather than tools for instruction, the artist suggests that the meaning of these artworks should emerge from the multiple relations between objects in the exhibition and the world outside of it. For Dennis, the exhibition environment often serves as a site for experimentation, producing long cycles of work rather than individualised objects. Featured in the exhibition are artworks that re-perform propositions about geology (land and landlessness) and cosmology (local knowledge and the multiverse) that have come to inform the political arc of the artist’s practice. 

Embedded within the logic of Dennis’s artistic practice is an interrogation of systems and fields of knowledge. Dennis redirects geological techniques like stratigraphy to read time and place through layers of the earth, revealing personal and political fictions about our proximity and connection to land.  

UNDERSTUDIES offers a series of propositions to reconceive our own relationship to forms of instruction and authority. Through a set of conceptual devices, the artist’s practice subverts and contends with universalised and exclusionary perceptions of the “known” world. On display in the exhibition is a new configuration of the widely-travelled, wall installation titled Black Liberation Zodiac (Molalatladi)(2018–ongoing) which features iconography of Black and African liberation archives and its shared histories that, when mapped onto the southern hemisphere night sky, offer a counter system for thinking about global, celestial and universal relations.  

“At Zeitz MOCAA, Dennis unsettles his own artistic authorship by inviting several museum staff to co-produce an artwork. This site-aware ‘recipe work’ titled: Xenolith (Letsema) (2024)—materialises as a free-standing column of tightly packed soil made by some of the many hands that work within and care for the infrastructure of the museum daily. With this gesture, Dennis cites museum workers as fellow collaborators and co-conspirators invested in the social architecture of collective learning in the museum, says Thato Mogotsi, the curator of UNDERSTUDIES, and Curator of Contemporary Art at Zeitz MOCAA. 

UNDERSTUDIES foregrounds the artist’s impulse to work within and against grammars of world-making; questioning where power and knowledge are located. 

UNDERSTUDIES forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualise the practices of artists from Africa and the Diaspora. 

Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by Gucci, the Mellon Foundation, and BMW South Africa.